What Happened to Global Warming?

[ALS]

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

Paul Hudson - BBC - October 10, 2009

I guess starting in 2010 it will be the coming Ice Age that is going to kill us all. --Ed.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Recent research has ruled out solar influences on temperature increases
Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). ... [Read More]

[Chuck]

My biggest concern on the Global Warming issue is intelligent discussion of sustainability issues at large is sucked into partisan politics in a manner similar to when a young man sees a hot girl and blood is sucked from his brain to the crotch.

"Global Warming is a crock promoted by Al Gore"
"Global Warming is a vast left wing conspiracy"
"Therefore I'll use more energy to defy this nonsense"

In the meantime, we will spend around $700B to mostly unfriendly OPEC nations, borrowing most of that money from the Chinese - really patriotic?! We cut down more forests and wilderness so desertification expands in North Africa, the Western US...oh but isn't that another liberal myth like the Dust Bowl in the 1930's?....the Dust Bowl is like Atlantis - a myth. Sea life is declining - you may or may not believe Acid Test: Documentary on how CO2 is destroying our oceans but it's declining.

Seems pretty clear the Earth is being pushed past it's limits in a number of ways and Global Warming denial is being used to give a blind eye to obviously unsustainable consumption.

[ALS]

Your dead on yet the same people who are pushing global warming are doing everything they can to make us more dependant on foreign oil. Thus more money to the Middle East and more borrowing from other countries.

Funny how we are not allowed to drill in our own country and Government regulations don't let us exploit our superior energy reserves here in the western United States. A perfect example of this is California. The state is flat out broke but they still will not let anyone drill for oil off their coast. That oil would produce millions of dollars of revenue each year to the state through licencing and royalties from the production.

Basic science taught to elementary students can explain the rise in CO2 but the experts can't figure it out. The oceans are releasing vast amounts of CO2 due to the fact in the article that they are cooling. A bottle of Coke heated to 100 degrees will hold a lot more CO2 in solution than a bottle of Coke at 35 degrees. The oceans are a carbon sink for almost 50% of the CO2 produced on the planet. If they are cooling then the CO2 that has been locked up in them is being released into the atmosphere as they cool.

More CO2 means more plant life on the planet also. More plant life means more carbon sinks are being produced to absorb the C02 being released from the Oceans. The Earth will balance itself out with our interference. I posted an article a month or so ago about how trees are growing at an accelerated rate due to the higher CO2 levels.

[Chuck]

Originally Posted by ALS

Your dead on yet the same people who are pushing global warming are doing everything they can to make us more dependant on foreign oil. Thus more money to the Middle East and more borrowing from other countries.

You have a point: we need to develop more energy and those talking green need to aggressively have a plan.

If I were President...they would think T Boone Pickens was really in changer, but that's fine with me. I'd divert the oil subsidies to alt energy and see to it there is an explosion of wind farms, solar roofs and new grids to send the power. The Gulf and East Coast would have offshore wind and tidal farms.

[booferama]

What happened to good journalism? The BBC should be embarrassed to have published that. Let's go through it line by line.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

So far, so good. Nothing wrong there. (Although it's not a surprise that 1998 was the warmest year on record--it was the strongest El Nino year of the 20th century [link below].) Oh, and the headline is not a surprise: news organizations benefit from consumer attention.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

Whoops! Already inaccurate. While it's true that no year has been as hot as 98, that's because 98 was an outlier, well above the trend line. But there has been, in fact, a continued warming trend. AGW does not claim that every year will be hotter than the previous year; on the contrary, it argues that, over time, the global trend will continue to increase in correlation with accelerated amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

Just a wretched sentence. "Our climate models did not forecast it." What does that "it" refer to? Just go back and check--there's not a clear antecedent in the previous sentence. (Of course, the temperature trend has continued upward, just as models predicted, even though the climate models have actually underpredicted the temperature rise.) [If you'd like to read that article, let me know.]

Also, what an oddly constructed phrase: "man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet." That "thought to be" blurs the issue. How about a rewrite: "man-made carbon dioxide, the gas argued to be responsible for warming the planet by hundreds of thousands of scholarly articles and that no peer-reviewed scientific work has refuted in any meaningful way." And if you'd like to mention Benny Peiser's response that claims there's plenty of scientific debate, you should read this first.

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

Also, flat earth theorists continue to "passionately and consistently argue" that the earth is flat. Young earth creationists continue to "passionately and consistently argue" that the fossil record is utterly meaningless for determining the age of the planet. They don't have science on their side, but they sure do have tenacity!

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

Just to note here, remember it for later: AGW acknowledges solar activity in global temperatures.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

Who is Piers Corbyn? What is Weatheraction? Guess what? He makes predictions about the weather, predictions that are sometimes accurate and sometimes inaccurate, and he doesn't make public his method. Why, he must be a reliable source on a scientific issue!

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

Ah, he has a claim. Has he released any evidence? Nope. What will his evidence consist of? No one knows. Is this newsworthy? Yes. Why? Because Piers Corbyn is "so excited" about the claim he making, which the author of the BBC article has seen none of the evidence for.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

If I dropped an apple, yet gravity did not pull the apple to the ground, that could revolutionize the whole subject. And you know what else is possible? Someone systematically refuting hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed articles worth of research that argues for global warming (and, just to reiterate, almost no peer-reviewed scientific articles refuting it). Sure, it could happen. Why not? Also, it could rain frogs tomorrow.

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores.
. . . .
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it [the ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

Do news organizations have fact checkers anymore? Has the ocean been losing its warmth and been starting to cool down? Check the link.

But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.

This seems like it would be a good place in the BBC article to mention that the scientists who are passionate about their science being solid actually have science on their side. (If you're scoring at home, that's hundreds of thousands of articles to one.

The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models.

In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

I find it interesting how the article treats the evidenceless claim by Piers Corbyn and the UK Met Office, which relies on constantly updated scientific data, as equal claims.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Actually, this doesn't "confuse the issue even further." To clear up the confusion, you just have to read a couple of paragraphs down:

But [Latif] makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

So, to sum up: Mojib Latif sees a brief period of cooling coming, which he "believes" will be followed by warming. Interesting that he just "believes" this. On what is his belief based? Oh, if only the article could tell us. But, for some reason, it chooses not to. Journamalism at its finest!

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

Oh, a couple other things are for sure. The "debate" over global warming is only taking place outside where scientists publish their research findings.

Wonder how scientists feel about articles like this one in the BBC? Read about hypermiling in most media outlets as dangerous.

[brick]

I would be perfectly happy if the GW/GCC debate went away. It's not that I don't think there's some chance that our carbon-belching habits could screw with the ecosystem substantially. That could cause serious problems, obviously. Rather, it's that this issue is so polarizing, and makes so much noise, that half of the times I try to have a rational conversation with someone about conservation and sustainability, they immediately go "Oh, you mean the global warming thing. That's BS so there's no reason to change anything." *&)^ing hang me. It takes three times the effort just to get started talking about things that simply aren't debatable, and are just as solid motivation to conserve and seek renewable alternatives. There are some who get it right off the bat. And people who know me well understand what really motivates me. But for the rest it's like trying to have a conversation on a train while I'm running alongside on the platform.

Either way, the simple solutions to foreign oil dependence and fuel price volatility involve less carbon by default. Just use less of what we already get. But that would associate you with them...

[phoebeisis]

The below is backwards. The colder the water, the more gas it will dissolve. It is the opposite of solid solutes like sugar.

Look at it the same way you would look the density of just the gas-at the same pressure, same volume, you can fit more molecules of a cold gas in a container, than the same gas at a higher temp.
The colder the gas molecules are the lower their average energy-and average velocity. Since the velocity is lower, you can stuff more in a given sized box. The gases don't really interact with the water molecules in the same way that solid molecules do.

"Basic science taught to elementary students can explain the rise in CO2 but the experts can't figure it out. The oceans are releasing vast amounts of CO2 due to the fact in the article that they are cooling. A bottle of Coke heated to 100 degrees will hold a lot more CO2 in solution than a bottle of Coke at 35 degrees. The oceans are a carbon sink for almost 50% of the CO2 produced on the planet. If they are cooling then the CO2 that has been locked up in them is being released into the atmosphere as they cool. "


Charlie

[dr61]

Thank you, Booferama, for an excellent dissection of a very misleading article.

Another point: 1998, the year with the largest El Nino current in the 20th century, was only the warmest year (global average) in one major data set. On another data set, 2005 is the warmest. And the article makes no mention of inherent natural variability in yearly average global temperatures. Nor the fact that in the northern hemisphere, where most of the land mass of the earth is located, 5 years in the 21st century have been warmer than 1998.

An informative video with more information on El Nino and global temperatures:
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman.../3/QwnrpwctIh4

[ALS]

Originally Posted by phoebeisis

The below is backwards. The colder the water, the more gas it will dissolve. It is the opposite of solid solutes like sugar.

Look at it the same way you would look the density of just the gas-at the same pressure, same volume, you can fit more molecules of a cold gas in a container, than the same gas at a higher temp.
The colder the gas molecules are the lower their average energy-and average velocity. Since the velocity is lower, you can stuff more in a given sized box. The gases don't really interact with the water molecules in the same way that solid molecules do.

Charlie

Thank you for the correction. Senior moment.

[Earthling]

Originally Posted by ALS

Basic science taught to elementary students can explain the rise in CO2 but the experts can't figure it out. The oceans are releasing vast amounts of CO2 due to the fact in the article that they are cooling. A bottle of Coke heated to 100 degrees will hold a lot more CO2 in solution than a bottle of Coke at 35 degrees. The oceans are a carbon sink for almost 50% of the CO2 produced on the planet. If they are cooling then the CO2 that has been locked up in them is being released into the atmosphere as they cool.

Sorry, but that's dead wrong. The solubility of CO2 in water goes DOWN with higher temperatures. A quick Google result:
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:...&ct=clnk&gl=us

At room temperature, the solubility of carbon dioxide is about 90 cm3 of CO2 per 100 ml water (cl/cg = 0.8).

Any water-soluble gas becomes more soluble as the temperature decreases, due to the thermodynamics of the reaction: GAS (l) ó GAS (g).

Table 1: Solubility of CO2 at a partial pressure for CO2 of 1 bar abs[3].

Temperature (oC) 0 10 20 30 40 50 80 100
Solubility
(cm3 CO2/g water) 1.8 1.3 0.88 0.65 0.52 0.43 0.29 0.26
Harry